Perennial improvements in digital electronics, as described by Moore's Law, delivered forth the ubiquitous personal computer which has computing power comparable to supercomputers of the not so distant past, and for which a myriad of business, engineering, communication, entertainment and other applications have been developed.
At present, the unceasing progress in digital electronics has further progressed computer technology and brought forth handheld devices (e.g., smartphones) with sufficient computing power to run many of the most popular applications that have been run on personal computers. However, one hindrance in the migration of many applications to handheld devices, is the limited screen size of handheld devices, which makes protracted use of many applications (e.g., spreadsheets, text editing) impractical if not impossible.
It has previously been proposed to incorporate a small video projector within handheld electronic devices. For example such a device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,637,896 to Li et al. FIG. 2 shows a handheld device with built in video projector being used to project a relatively large computer display image on a wall so that the displayed image can be easily viewed by two or more people. The current trend toward making handheld devices smaller and in particular thinner poses challenges to the proposition of including video projectors within handheld devices, particularly if it is desired to include a high resolution (e.g., mega pixel) video projector within a handheld device.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.